


Uncovered

by halotolerant



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, First Time, Getting Together, Homophobic Language, M/M, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, cannibalism mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-04
Updated: 2016-12-04
Packaged: 2018-09-06 12:11:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8750350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: Given the number of degrees, diplomas and doctoral qualifications between the two of them, Will reckons it took a worrying amount of time for them to make the connection between intimate living and, well, sexual intimacy.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I never posted this here, it would seem? I wrote this an entire year ago, I think it was about my first post-TWOTL idea. Heh, turns out Cuba was not a bad guess *g*

Given the number of degrees, diplomas and doctoral qualifications between the two of them, Will reckons it took a worrying amount of time for them to make the connection between intimate living and, well, sexual intimacy. 

Between loving, and love-making, if that phrases it better - except it doesn’t because there are no euphemisms for sex that aren’t either twee or disgusting. 

Point being, though, whatever you call it, it took a long time for them to get there.

At first, fair enough, there had been small issues like survival and freedom to consider; getting out of the water, getting warm, getting their insides to stop trying to escape to their outsides – it’s not negligible stuff. Will’s glad that he doesn’t remember it that clearly; the half-crawl up the beach at the inlet, the horrible endurance ordeal of making it up the cliff path and trying to support each other in the darkness. 

It turned out Hannibal had another secret house a mile or so down the coast, so that he could go there in order to spy on his first secret house. 

Well, obviously. 

“At what level of obsessive psychopathic redundancy, exactly, do you ever say ‘enough is enough’?” Will vaguely remembers asking, whilst under some hefty and interesting nitrous oxide sedation so Hannibal could attend to his wounds. Hannibal was the worse hurt, cold and his hands shaking, but he got them sewn up, and he did Will first. That, in a man always so cautious in his self-preservation, had seemed strangely off key. 

Will had objectively understood, had banked on the idea, that he mattered more to Hannibal than anything. But reasoning it out like a sequence of chess moves and watching the truth of it bleed from Hannibal’s gut onto the thousand-dollar carpet was another thing. 

He’d often wanted to kill Hannibal. Often fantasized about it. About standing over him as it happened. 

In the moment, Will reached out, put his hands to Hannibal’s stomach, pressed down and prayed – maybe not to God, maybe just to the whatever governed the force that was Hannibal, that had kept him going this far. Maybe that was God, or maybe you could call it that. 

“Stay with me,” Will had whispered, urgently. “Fix yourself. I need you to stay with me.” 

They weren’t prayers, but they were words that brought Hannibal life. Will suddenly and sharply understood that, then. 

The best thing would have been to hole up and heal up at Obsessive Redundant Secret House The Second for at least a month. It was furnished, wood for the stove was chopped, the kitchen was full of cans and the trunk freezer in the empty garage full of mystery meat. 

“This is pork,” Hannibal said, wearily. They’d been asleep together, clapped out still fully and bloodily dressed on the double bed, with a blanket thrown over them, for the better part of forty-eight hours. There was an en-suite, and periodically one of them refilled a water jug and they’d neck back tablets. Now they were upright, and smelly, and hungry. “This volume of meat? It is pork, dead pig, from a wholesaler in Baltimore. You think I have that kind of spare time?”

Will laughed. He really hadn’t meant to. It was the Serious Conversation, the one that was going to Define the Future, and the thing he’d forgotten was that Hannibal had always taken what he ate _incredibly_  seriously. Just. Not in the way most foodies did. 

Three year old frozen possibly-actually-pork in any amount, however, didn’t solve the fact that no matter how well Hannibal had hidden his ownership of the house, the FBI were going to come by on door-to-door in the area sooner or later anyway. 

Of course, Will wasn’t yet necessarily a fugitive from justice. Hannibal pointed this out in a non-committal, suspiciously casual way over a brunch of Half a Cupboard of Tins Mixed In a Dried Egg Omelette (You Can’t Complain If You Can’t Stand Up to Cook Anything Else, Hannibal). 

“Yeah, I know. Arguably, I’m your kidnap victim,” Will had agreed, keeping his own tone light and adjusting a burner on the stove. He shot a look at Hannibal, wrapped in a blanket, skin still pale, eyes bruised with exhaustion, still in a snit about Will’s culinary choices, and so very casually asking if Will was going to leave him all alone again. 

“Yeah,” Will continued, putting a spatula in the pan and sighing theatrically. “Just another victim lured off the road and into the car of a driver with corrupting intentions.”

There was a lot to be said – although for multiple reasons Will might be the only person on earth saying it – for the emotional potential of eating entire roasted wine-drowned songbirds with someone who thought they’d turned you into an infant serial killer. 

But, as it turned out, there was a lot to be said for the moment when you met a guy’s eyes over a rough and ready (fair enough:  _disgusting_ ), lumpy carrot and pea omelette, and told him that despite all sense and legality, you’d found you kind of liked being with him more than… more than any life at all without him. 

Putting it like that, Will’s more astounded than ever that at the time he didn’t think of it as ‘love’ at all. Just something necessary. Like if you were freezing and drowning you obviously got out of the sea and found something warm, that didn’t need a name; in the same way, if he didn’t have Hannibal Lecter he wound up needing to go to him. Because that was how life stayed livable. 

‘Love’ as a word in the English language is pretty useless anyway. You can ‘love’ ice-cream and your pet and your lover and your job and your car, so it’s not like it’s a tremendously subtle differential between that which is, you know, fine and that which nourishes the heart of your being. 

They didn’t talk about love. They didn’t talk about what they going to do, or how any of it could possibly succeed. 

Hannibal went to put on some music, and struggled, walking, and Will went to his side, and somehow they ended up on the couch together under Hannibal’s smelly blanket, asleep again, Bach’s secular cantatas praising nothing but beauty in the air around them. 

Then came the journey to the Mexican border, of which the least said about the better. When Will thinks about it he remembers two things distinctly: how it felt to realize he could read the exact moment when Hannibal decided someone deserved to die – that blank blink like a crocodile when they got overcharged for infested beds or given pie with the wrong topping, or that guy who saw them at a gas station and started whistling and making limp-wrist gestures, other hand on his hip. 

That was the other thing that stood out. The second realization. 

That he, Will Graham, voted most likely to go live in a survivalist cabin and marry a bear, was in a pair of pants with a fancy brand label, sharing his life with a man who owned a nail file. And people looked at that, and they saw ‘gay’. Or, indeed, ‘pansy-ass faggots’. 

(No one got killed on their journey – no time, too risky, Hannibal’s stitches and NO - but for that gas station guy Will might not have argued those excuses all that long. He’d had a feeling Hannibal read that on him, especially when Hannibal gave in for the rest of the day about radio station choices in the car. Hannibal was weirdly immature in those little things – a person used to living alone, and used to being peerless. The first time Will suggested ordering one dessert between them and splitting it, he’d acted like it was the actual demarcation of North and South Korea, deeply protective of his one and a half of the three cherries)

The motel room beds weren’t really big enough for two, but for a while they still got cold and panicked if they slept alone and no one had time for that, so sharing it was. Sometimes they spent the night in the car. Those times Hannibal titled his seat back and Will lay sideways with his head in Hannibal’s lap. 

It didn’t seem like the biggest deal. Actually, it was pretty nice. Hannibal smelled… reassuring. 

In his defense, Will thinks, Hannibal had once tried to open his skull with an electric saw, so Will could maybe be excused for not having freaked out about being vaguely in contact with Hannibal’s dick like that was literally the most terrifying option imaginable. 

They had a thick bundle of paper money that had been stashed at the Second Secret House. Hannibal counted cherry halves but he let Will spend whatever he wanted, carry the cash bag whenever. 

They crossed the border at Laredo, Texas. They had fake passports Hannibal had got couriered in an anonymous package from his Secret Extra Redundant Safe Drop in Baltimore, apparently put together when he’d thought all three of them were going to Italy  _en famille._

By this point Baltimore, and Virginia, and all of it had started to seem like another person’s life for Will, but that jarred. She wasn’t there, and then there were the others, all the people who weren’t anywhere on Earth anymore but underground, and because of Hannibal, or him, or them both. 

If there was the remotest truth in those who had gone looking down, what would Beverley think, watching him now?

He’d never been so close to walking away as he was going through that border checkpoint, watching the guard putting down his official stamps with a bored expression, not looking twice at their IDs. Will had thought then about what might happen if he yelled out who Hannibal was, if people would get it at once, if people even cared any more or if the news cycle had moved on to something else. 

They cleared the border, got most of the way over the bridge. Hannibal was driving. As they hit the Mexican soil the other end, Hannibal put his hand over Will’s. 

Thelma and Louise had kissed before the end, but then they knew they were at the end.

Hannibal had never seen  _Thelma and Louise_ , so that ended that conversation. He had barely seen any films; he said he was never interested in the people in them. Pressed, he admitted he liked  _My Fair Lady_ , and then looked at Will as if daring him to pass a comment. 

Or so Will had thought. In retrospect, maybe he’d been waiting to see if Will got it. 

From Monterrey in Mexico to Havana, Cuba was a three hour flight. Hannibal had deeply-seated philosophical issues with pistachio nuts in bags. They watched  _Funny Face_  on the in-flight movie system together, and Will fell asleep with his head on Hannibal’s shoulder. 

At the hotel in Havana, Will drank mojitos and waited to regret something. They only got one hotel room, with one bed, and didn’t think anything of it until the page gave them a dirty look when he came to help move their bags to the taxi to take them to the house Hannibal had bought. 

“No,” Will said softly, when he saw the look come up in Hannibal’s eyes. And then, to be a dick, he kissed him. 

Yes, Will now always has to remember that he kissed the love of his life for the first time so he could piss off a Cuban teenager. That, he does regret. 

The house was beautiful, in a shabby sort of way, and smelt of citrus and old paper. They spent some time cleaning it up. Hannibal still needed to rest, but he was getting stronger. He was back in charge of the cooking, and frankly showing off. 

Will smiled over plates of contortionist fish, and caught himself laughing fondly some more. 

He put his arms round Hannibal in bed because he needed Hannibal to understand he much he wanted him there. They’d kept to one bed, still. Perhaps that would have been weird and worthy of discussion to others, but it still ranked outside the top thousand strangest things, in Will’s opinion, about his situation. 

Their relationship had never known normal boundaries. Breaching things was what happened, what they did, what defined them. Something they only permitted from each other. 

“Did you ever live with anyone, like, long term?” he asked Hannibal one night, when they were sitting by the wide open window, drinks in hand. Hannibal was reading Sartre, Will was reading Ernest Hemingway – he regretted that, too, and was eager to put it aside. 

“Never since leaving the house of my guardians,” Hannibal told him. He put his own book down on his lap. “I had never desired a companion. I did not think there could be any companion I would desire.” Then he took sharp breath in. “I considered desire… all forms of desire, something to be controlled. Used as necessary. Kept disciplined, ready to use or refrain from using as necessary. Animals sate their lusts.” He sounded almost apologetic. 

Will sat back in his chair. “We’re not sleeping together,” he said, astounded. 

“Of course, you have no wish to continue - I can easily get the other bedframe assembled and then you can…”

“No. I mean. We aren’t… we aren’t having sex. I mean, why aren’t we?”

Hannibal stared at him, eyes widening. Sudden, sharp, painfully obvious hopefulness. 

OK, so maybe it was Will who took a while to figure it out. 

And then – then, not until then, not until all that time, all those things and thoughts had passed, did Will make the realization that explained it all. 

This wasn’t just about need. Never had been. 

“I want you,” Will said, and it was almost a question, breathless, and he reached out, took Hannibal’s hand into his own, brought it to his lips, unthinking, easy. “I want you more than I care about wanting anything else.”

They’d not been travelling, they’d been here the whole time. Together. 

Hannibal rose, his eyes dark and wet, and obsessive and psychopathic, and beautiful, and bore him down onto the rug, hot, at last uncovered. 


End file.
